Lovely Weather For A Sleigh Ride...

Since we aren't fortunate enough to do our winter traveling by sleigh this holiday season, we've been driving all over the state of Illinois instead. Today, amid the falling snow, we stopped to put gas in the car when Mom spotted this cute little fellow at the gas station and he brightened our day:

I'll Be Seeing You...

When I was but a wee high school student, I did an inordinate amount of handwringing over the decision of which college to attend. Deep down, I knew I needed a change in my life that would not be afforded by going to Northwestern, my top choice school. Northwestern would keep me in the same geographic area, surrounded by many of the same people with whom I had gone to high school. Washington University in St. Louis, which I had only applied to as a back-up school on the advice of my guidance counselor, had the dual advantages of distance, and virtually nobody I knew from high school was going there. I opted for Wash U, but I was terrified. Night after night I would pour my heart out to my parents, fretting that I would be unable to make new friends there, and I would spend the next four years of my life miserable and lonely. They did their best to reassure me, but right up until that first day of school, I was unconvinced.

In the end, I need not have worried. Not only did I make friends, I made amazing friends, with whom I am still close, despite having scattered to different corners of the globe. Although I do not get to see them nearly as much as I might like, I try to see them whenever I have a chance, and luckily for me, Christmas usually affords me the opportunity to visit with my friend, Abel, who returns from Japan every year to be with his family for the holidays. His family happens to live not too far from my grandma's house, where we travel every year for our own Christmas celebration, so Abel and I try to set aside time to catch up.

Every year, it seems hard to believe that so much time has elapsed, but in spite of the time and the distance, we always seem to fall back into an easy rapport. Although I certainly wish I got to see my college pals more often, I am thankful to have such relationships in my life. The chance to reconnect with even just one of them makes my holiday season a little sweeter, and is yet another reason why Christmas is my favorite time of the year.

Hallelujah...

At long last, the day for which I have been preparing myself for the past three months has come to pass -- after a week of prep work and two solid days of baking, I have completed my 2010 Cookie Bonanza. The seven types of cookies that I tested and tweaked were lovingly crafted in my kitchen and boxed to be given away today, all before eleven o'clock last night. I even had all the dishes washed as well! In the past two years, I've usually stayed up until the wee hours of the morning completing everything, so in some regards, my efficiency this year could be looked upon as a type of victory.

However, it is difficult for me to celebrate a full night of rest, when I could have stayed up late adding an eighth cookie to the lineup, which would have meant that I had outdone myself relative to last year. At least I tied last year's level of production, and I feel like I satisfied most of my goals for this year: I had a good balance of cookie types, including cutouts, pressed cookies, drop cookies, bar cookies, and refrigerator cookies; and I had a good balance of flavors, including citrus, spice, chocolate and peppermint among others. If I had to identify weaknesses in this year's lineup, it would have been a lack of something nutty, something caramel-flavored, and perhaps a sandwich cookie. Still, although I was unable to surpass myself this year, I still feel good about this year's giveaway, which consisted of the following:

• 3 Iced Hermit Bar Cookies
• 3 Decorated Sugar Cookies
• 5 Vanilla Bean Spritz
• 2 Peppermint Chocolate Chip Cookies
• 3 Lemon Poppy Seed Thumbprints
• 4 Cranberry Orange Pinwheels
• 3 "World Peace" Chocolate Sablés

I was not quite as pleased with this year's packaging, which came from the Container Store. The festive Martha Stewart boxes that I used in previous years were square, and easier to transport.

Now that I am done, I plan to take a hiatus from baking for the forseeable future. Butter, flour, and sugar have lost all allure to be for the time being, and I'm sure my waistline, and those of my friends and colleagues who have been the test subjects for all my trial baked goods in the last months, will thank me...

Give Peace A Chance...

Going into this weekend of baking, I had filled every slot in my line-up except for one -- the chocolate cookie. Last year, I fused the peppermint category with the chocolate one, choosing to bake chocolate peppermint cookies, but this year, I wanted to focus solely on the unadulterated flavor of chocolate for my selection. I thought seriously about going with my chocolate brownie cookies, which are a perennial favorite, but ultimately, I was swayed by my interminable desire to experiment with new recipes.

I didn't even have to hunt through my recipe archives, cookbooks, and magazines to find something I wanted to try; Dorie Greenspan's "World Peace Cookies" have been floating around the food blogosphere ever since I started getting interested in cooking and baking after college. The cookies get their name from the assertion of an early recipe tester that if everyone were fed one of these cookies daily, there would be no more war or conflict, because everyone would be too blissed out on chocolate. Every blogger from here to the other end of the world has raved about them, and I was curious. Plus, as a slice-and-bake cookie, they would save me valuable baking time in a weekend when I was already feeling strained for time.

The cookies were definitely simple enough to put together. In fact, the recipe warned against over mixing, so I just mixed them up by hand with a wooden spoon. While the results were certainly tasty -- an ethereally tender crumb, studded with bits of rich bittersweet chocolate -- I'm not sure they would solve all the world's problems. I actually think my humble brownie cookies, taken from an advertisement for Baker's Chocolate, are more intensely flavored than this wildly popular recipe from one of the world's foremost baking authorities. Sometimes it pays to stick to what you know...

World Peace Cookies

adapted from Dorie Greenspan

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick plus 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup light brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon fleur de sel or 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped into chips

Sift the flour, cocoa and baking soda together.
Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter on medium speed until soft and creamy. Add both sugars, the salt and vanilla extract and beat for 2 minutes more.
Turn off the mixer. Pour in the flour, drape a kitchen towel over the stand mixer to protect yourself and your kitchen from flying flour and pulse the mixer at low speed about 5 times, a second or two each time. Take a peek — if there is still a lot of flour on the surface of the dough, pulse a couple of times more; if not, remove the towel. Continuing at low speed, mix for about 30 seconds more, just until the flour disappears into the dough — for the best texture, work the dough as little as possible once the flour is added, and don’t be concerned if the dough looks a little crumbly. Toss in the chocolate pieces and mix only to incorporate.
Turn the dough out onto a work surface, gather it together and divide it in half. Working with one half at a time, shape the dough into logs that are 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Wrap the logs in plastic wrap and refrigerate them for at least 3 hours. (The dough can be refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months. If you’ve frozen the dough, you needn’t defrost it before baking — just slice the logs into cookies and bake the cookies 1 minute longer.)
To Bake: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 325°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.
Working with a sharp thin knife, slice the logs into rounds that are 1/2 inch thick. (The rounds are likely to crack as you’re cutting them — don’t be concerned, just squeeze the bits back onto each cookie.) Arrange the rounds on the baking sheets, leaving about one inch between them.
Bake the cookies one sheet at a time for 12 minutes — they won’t look done, nor will they be firm, but that’s just the way they should be. Transfer the baking sheet to a cooling rack and let the cookies rest until they are only just warm, at which point you can serve them or let them reach room temperature.

I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm...

Except, not really. Justin has been out of town this week for his sister's graduation, which has left me with plenty of time to hole up in my kitchen, churning out the cookies of this year's Cookie Bonanza. With only my oven to turn to for warmth, I was inspired to create mitten cookies for this year's iced sugar cookie offering.

To be completely honest, I almost decided not to decorate cookies this year, and to produce delicious albeit unadorned sugar cookies according to my favorite recipe from my great-aunt Lois. After going out every night of the week prior to my baking weekend, I was feeling overwhelmed and pressed for time. The last thing I wanted to do was spend my two days fastidiously piping cookies when I needed to be baking, but I knew the assortment would be missing its star attraction without the iced cookies. Their beauty draws the boxes together, and adds the necessary "wow" factor that makes my recipients smile when they first open their gifts. Much as I wanted to make things easier on myself, I just couldn't bring myself to cut corners on something I deemed so important.

As it turned out, the mittens were definitely the way to go. I only needed to make two colors of icing, as I did the final detail work using red store-brought royal icing (achieving a true red in homemade icing is just too difficult to bother with, in my humble opinion), and I was able to execute simple yet attractive geometric motifs, since the cookies did not have to be representational. One of my great joys in cookie decorating is experimenting with new patterns, so these cookies allowed me to play to my strengths and enjoy myself in the process. I was glad that I went through the effort of making them, and I think they will make a stunning focal point for this year's Cookie Bonanza.

Gezelligheid...

Although I am a huge fan of Andrew Bird's music, I must confess, I am not very into music in general. When I go to a concert, I want to hear the songs I've come to love from an artist, not new material they're working on. So when I went to see Andrew Bird tonight in a revisiting of last year's holiday Gezelligheid concert concept, I was a little disappointed to discover that he is working on releasing a new album (which would otherwise be something to celebrate), as it meant that he did not perform a single piece all evening that I recognized. Don't get me wrong, I was still impressed with his use of elaborate musical looping and layering of sounds, and his set was still enjoyable.

The same could not be said for the opening act, experimental jazz guitarist Jeff Parker. When he first went on stage, I was under the impression that he was tuning his guitar. After several minutes, it became clear that the random noises and series of scales were in fact, his first "composition." (The very fact that he considered his pieces "compositions" and not songs, was not a good sign to me, in itself.) I suffered silently through the first composition, pondering if perhaps it was just too high-brow for me, when Darrell (with whom I had gone to see the show) leaned over and whispered to me, "It is clear that Andrew Bird hates his fans, and this is how he's choosing to tell us." I felt a little better knowing I wasn't alone in my perception of Parker's wretchedness, but it was still an incredibly long 45 minutes to sit through to get to the main event.

Even though I wished there would have been more opportunities to sing along in my head to Andrew Bird's music, I'm still glad I went to see this year's Gezelligheid show. For me, it was more of an amuse bouche than a musical meal unto itself. Now I'm looking forward to the his upcoming release, so that I can learn all the new material and be familiar with it when he tours to promote the album. Hopefully, that concert will be something to look forward to in 2011.

Christmas Time All Over The World...

So much of the holidays is about tradition, and the comforting repetion of time-honored rituals that draw people together based on their shared histories and experiences. Lately, however, I find that the same traditions that usually bring me so much joy around Christmas time have been feeling more like a burden. To be completely honest, I've simply not been feeling the Christmas spirit this year. I've been going through the motions, waiting for my usual sense of excitement to kick in, and I've managed to capture a glimmer here or there, but for the most part, I've just been faking it.

When it came time to head to the Christkindlmarket for Lisa and I's annual photo-op in front of the Daley Plaza tree, it was just another item on my seasonal to-do list. Tonight, after we dutifully captured a perfect image, Lisa confessed to me that she wasn't particularly in the mood to consume our usual German holiday treats, and I was secretly elated. I quickly suggested that we head to our favorite Chinese restaurant instead, and she readily accepted. In place of a traditional European Christmas, Lisa and I opted to celebrate the holiday in a way more in keeping with Jewish tradition -- by consuming Chinese food. It may have been an oddly international Christmas mash-up, but it felt right to us, and in the end, celebrating the season together is more important than how we choose to do it.